


Raven Governance

by youkkai



Category: Original Work
Genre: ADHD, Accounting, Actuarial Sciences, Bipolar Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, College, Comedy, Economics, M/M, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:28:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21957415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youkkai/pseuds/youkkai
Summary: Being part of a research group on college is a stupendous opportunity to level up your curriculum and scientific knowledge. Nonetheless, your happiness will soon be confronted with the trade-off between such benefits and the cost of degrading mental health: petty scientific schools' disagreements with each other, working and socializing with people from other programs, professors eager to revitalize slavery. Is accepting this challenge really worth finally being able to eat more than two instant noodles a day?





	1. Prellude

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not a native speaker and I currently don't have a beta-reader. If you're interested in beta-reading this work, please message me.
> 
> That being said, I do hope you enjoy this work. I already have other finished chapters and they'll soon be released.

"The conjecture is very simple: cycles, malinvestments—I'm sorry, bad investments; do not ever use "malinvestments" on your tests or else you'll fail—, externalities and so forth: All of those are bound to happen. For those who don't remember the fine details from the Economics courses you took two years ago, what I mean is that your actions will affect others' lives," Professor Benjamin stated to the diverse class of Advanced Microeconomics. He had issues turning to the next sheet of the course, since cognaque was at a unforgivingly low price dating to a hot girl's suicide. "Now, consider that the government were to intervene before such disgraces actually took place. There is strong evidence that we could have a net welfare gain, the current reduction being overwhelmed by the future augmentation, that is, your actions would be regulated so as to impede you from harming the greater good. Of course, you may think that that's what happens already—when, say, the Fed tries to disinflate bubbles or some Latin American country tries to protect its century-old infant industry—and I could go on and on with counterexamples and the like, but I think what personally happened to me last month may be the best illustration: at the time, on the first of January, I received a few letters." 

The number of lifted heads expanded considerably after this one affirmation. It seemed that the amount of education was to be dropped considerably—life stories were always more interesting than convex optimization. "The postman may have had the best of intentions when he was putting the deliveries in my mailbox, but it just so happened that one of them contained fart bombs, a prank some kids like to do from time to time. Long story short, this is why I don't have my left arm anymore," the professor shook his torso so as to make the sleeve flop. "Now, I argue that maybe the postman should've been punished in advance: He was unaware of his action's prospect consequences on the general equilibrium, i.e., that his decisions would bring about the apocalypse. But so are rabbits in Australia, and I don't see them not being individually held accountable for what they might do. Truly inspirational. And that is why I'm making four scholarships available to my new research group: The Raven Governance Laboratory. Information on appliances, dates, interviews etc. are on my website and probably on my Grindr, since someone had the nerve to hack me yesterday."

The students began whispering and rocking their chairs, eager to work with an internationally prestigious professor and have extra money to eat more than two instant noodles a day. The Raven Governance Laboratory was promising.

"Now, as I was previously saying, you will be graded solely on terms of likeability, so, if I were you, I'd start by raising questions that do nothing but repeat what I've just said. Also, laugh at my jokes."


	2. Recurrent state

"Would you please sit the fuck down?" Rafael cried.

Pietro had been adjusting his position in the chair, unforgivingly clicking a pen and continuously walking in circles for a few minutes now, sometimes entering and exiting the room. Armed with clearity of the mind, Sverre found out he hated Pietro since the beginning of time.

"I'm bored to death. I-"

"I wish you did bore yourself to death."

"I already ran the regressions, I've saved the results, and by the way Benjamin's model is a disaster, I don't even know what we're trying to accomplish here, I mean, the model itself isn't even ready, how am I supposed to make any inference about something that isn't ready, half of the regressions are just correlations between, like, quantitative easings and weirdly shaped rocks, I shouldn't even know what 'quantitative easings' stands for" Pietro sputtered. "It's been hours since I came close to a console, this is retarded."

"Ok, let's take a break," Sverre said as he hit the table, jaw hardened.

The three men soon found themselves breathing in and breathing out outside the Financial Sciences' Department—FinSci for short. Fortunately, the November sun was blocked by the building; the large trees and the occasional breeze, albeit warm, were a nice touch.

It had been two months since Professor Benjamin accepted their requests to participate on the Raven Governance Laboratory—now nicknamed RavenLab, because sometimes it was just too hot to waste precious energy that would eventually be required to run after a bus. All three came from different programs, since the Department was wise enough to perceive that putting Economics and Actuary in the same class would bring about enormous benefits in terms of interdisciplinarity, an issue the Sociology Department had with the Chemistry Department since the Sanderson-Heuvelmans University was founded. 

Pietro's frustration with monetary policy came from his training on Accounting. Rafael came from Actuary—statistics on potential corpses turned about to be a great asset in the RavenLab. Sverre was the only one who knew what an offer curve was. The fourth scholarship was still open because, despite his efforts on making a diverse group that would englobe all of the Department's programs, Professor Benjamin was still unable to find anyone from Business Studies who could talk about a matrix that actually had a determinant.

"I heard turtles are on a strike again," Pietro commented, breaking the uneasy silence. The three had not had much time to befriend. "Something about too many bodies of immigrants polluting their water, I think."

"Incredible," Sverre replied as he lit up a cigarette and walked away.

"Hey, you've got a whole pack there, give me one!" Rafael exclaimed, following Sverre, who now leaned on a painted-white cementer pilaster. Pietro followed, eager to do something besides staring at a wall.

"Hello."

"Christ on a stick!" Rafael jumped. Professor Benjamin had somehow summoned himself out of thin air.

"How's the research going?"

"It's not ide-"

"Because I have a new task for you," he interrupted Pietro. "Consider that the world's engine stopped. It would be wonderful if you three would give a Bayesian estimation for the income multiplier under such circumstances. Of course, I'd get all of the credit."

After receiving no feedback but uncomfortable smiles, Professor Benjamin turned around to Block B, where the Ha Joon Rothbard School of Economics was based, hurrying back to his student's doctoral thesis presentation on the human capital of fetuses.

"The scholarship doesn't even cover this," Rafael sighed, pondering if holding on to the money so that he could still go to the neighborhood's stripclub was really worth it.

* * *

When Pietro finally got home at 9 PM, he thought, like he always did, everyone was asleep: Besides the TV's static screen, there was no sound whatsoever. He closed the door and left his shoes at the entrance, hoping his socks would muffle the sound of his steps. He stopped to stare at the living room and discovered that his father's eyes were actually open, although they didn't seem to move very often.

Not as careful anymore, he walked up to the kitchen and found his younger brother messing with some kind of pink powder, crashing it repeatedly so as to make it finer. "What's that?" He asked, causing Paweł to startle. 

"Himalayan salt," he answered, annoyed, after recovering from the scared, "this brand comes unrefined, so."

Pietro raised an eyebrow and quickly slid a finger through the substance smeared on the table, receiving a "Hey!" before tasting the content. He frowned, looking at Paweł with disgust. "You little shit, did you forge Dr. Social Bunny’s signature again?" he reprimanded as he went to the fridge to search for a half-eaten lasagna. "Save some for me."

"I'll try," Paweł answered as he curved his posture before the table.

Pietro smiled as he found the lasagna, feeling his stomach nearly growl. He put it in the microwave and, to make most of his time, opened his bag and grabbed his Advanced Cost Accounting book—he had a test tomorrow. He sit, the material in front of him, preparing for the worse. It was difficult not to immediately think of finishing the final levels of _Make Argentina Great Again_ , allegedly the most difficult game ever released, as his eyes went through what he knew would be never-ending balance sheets and affine formulas that somehow managed to get difficult to understand. He thanked the microwave clicking as an opportunity to delay the task for at least a few seconds.

The blessing, of course, couldn’t last for long. An itch installed itself on his neck; scratching it appeared to have no major effect. As usual, he was unable to concentrate on the incessant list of words, tables and symbols before him. He sighed heavily, trying to make sense of his now erratic breath. The sounds surrounding him were unexpectedly high—the occasional cars passing outside the house, the television in the living room, his brother continuous snorting. His highlighter wouldn’t stay put; most of the right bottom of the page was already soaked in neon yellow-green.

“Fuck!” He screamed.

Paweł jumped for the second time in the past hour. It wasn’t always trivial to stay in the same room as his older brother. He decided to ignore his outburst, since it was just one of the many he witnessed since he was born. Pietro left the room panting, his heart racing enough for him to hear his blood pulsing in his temples. His father cursed him for his very noticeable leaving of the house—a difficult task, since he inadvertently swallowed a fork he was using to scratch his uvula and still had not gone to the hospital. Pietro slammed the door and appeared to start running. As usual, no one in the house knew from what he was running and to where he was headed. It was possible that Pietro didn't knew either.


	3. Asymptotic divergence

Rafael couldn't have woken up worse. He considered the possibility of not going to today's classes for a long time, although his thoughts were interrupted every five minutes because a few extra alarms would go off. Sighing, eventually he was able to gather enough strength to get up from the bed.

The room was a mess—one was able to identify that the wall was painted beige, but the wooden floor was a challenge on its own: Empty beers, used condoms and cheap chips seemed to be the new trend among the youth. The boy walked to the bathroom as a perfect zombie, and, staring at his face in the mirror, his dark circles told him he did not, in fact, belong to the human race. After washing his face and taking the required two morning pills, he breathed lengthily before going to the kitchen, a floor down. He really wished he could just pretend he wasn't already late.

His mother, Ms. Misiones, was having her breakfast wine, carefully selected from a French magazine still to be exploded. Mr. Misiones, the man she decided to marry for reasons the cold, cruel logic of money could not possibly comprehend, was nowhere to be seen. Rafael wondered if he was still employed on that supermarket.

"Good morning, son," Ms. Misiones greeted, not taking her eyes off the journal. The front page had breaking news: "Breast cancer patient grows removed mamma back using the Banach-Tarski Theorem."

"'Sup," he answered. He thanked God they had air conditioning, a blessing on a sea of chaos. The kitchen was my no means ostentatious, losing only to his bedroom: It was small, the furniture was as well planned as a dadaist painting, cigarette butts decorated the dining table and the stand, and a Luján stood on top of the fridge, praying for what seemed would be eternity. "Where's the bread?" Rafael asked, his voice still groggy and his hair a tribute to last-century physicists.

Ms. Misiones turned the page without a care in the world, mainly because the news weren't actually that interesting. She was truly excited to get to the crossword section. "Beats me," she answered. She simultaneously encountered an article that seemed to be of interest to the family's well-being, causing her to raise her eyebrows for the first time since 6 AM. After a few minutes of reading, she raised her voice: "Rafael, do you think of killing yourself?"

Rafael frowned as he was pulled back from his daydreaming. "What?" he questioned back almost incomprehensibly, his mouth stuffed full of cereal.

Ms. Misiones repeated her question on sign language, making Rafael rolled his eyes dangerously close to his skull.

"What do you mean?" He conceded, giving up. "No, I don't. Why the sudden interest?"

"It says here that whether or not to kill yourself is one of the most important decisions a teenager can make. I know you're not 16 anymore, but let's be real, I noticed your hard-on on that feminist news on young women who haven't started to think about their life savings."

"Fuck's sake," Rafael exclaimed in agony as walked out of the kitchen, suddenly not hungry anymore.

"Your cereal doesn't have life savings as well, why don't you pay attention to it?" Ms. Misiones screamed as Rafael ran up the stairs. "You know that if you starve again you won't be able to blame me to social service."

* * *

"Be warned: It's coming. You don't feel or understand it, but soon the explosion will come. You won't be able to control it, you'll behave as if things are as marvellous as they were in the Belle Époque. Your complete lack of self-restraint will make you miserable, but you'll reckon the absence of spendable money and supporting folks are a result of some unrecognized genius," Professor Amanda dictated. "Those were the words of Sir Sur Neim, a star in our profession, as any of you should know by now, during the Golden Age. Now, how accurate were his predictions? Let's consider the risk of fatal accidents and its evolution spanning from the 50s to the 70s. What can you say about it?"

For the first time since he arrived 20 minutes late, Rafael paid attention to the class. He thought Pr. Amanda had asked him, but, on a more careful inspection, she was just pointing to someone behind him. He exhaled, relieved, waiting for the guy to stop educatedly guessing so that he could start drifting back to sleep, far from the professor's gaze.

In all fairness, he considered, he did study for a few minutes before getting bored. On his one and a half years of college, actuarial notation was by far the most exciting thing he had learned in the program: now his capital letters had armors; he used to draw them fighting against an evil, discrete density function. Before his last nap, the beta-binomial was being a real challenge.

* * *

"Sartre considered that he was so fucking awesome he could literally write his own destiny and, by extension, affect the others' ones. In a personal letter to de Gaulle, an underground philosopher who had discussed with Sartre wrote that he was so full of himself, he couldn't look straight at any issue."

"Moving on, let us investigate the Camus Axiom: There is no intrinsic meaning whatsoever in the universe and, therefore, attempting to reach such nonexistent meaning is a logical absurd. Henceforth, we've now unveiled the meaning of the universe." 

Rafael's snore was so loud it woke himself up. He raised his head to an unknown crowd who was now staring at him and a black board that was not filled with formulas, but topics concerning the very existence of almond milk. Feeling his cheeks beginning to burn impaclaby, he was fast to organize his bag and escape from the room. He had clearly mistaken the classroom for Risk Theory. His clumsy escape did not allow him to miss the professor's sarcastic commentary. 

"Don't you want to participate? Well, there he goes," he said bitterly as the door was shut. "Apparently the three Philosophies of Nothing are just too unreachable for some."

* * *

The new Nobel Prize had been announced just a few minutes before: It was to be awarded to Psychology. 

The Committee had opened an online poll to decide among Psychology, Statistics and Geosciences. Gender Studies made it to the top after 4Chan hacked into the site, but was excluded after a few hours.

It turned out that the Riksbank just didn't have enough money to fund three new prizes after spending most of Sweden's reserves on funding an emergency help plan to contain Norwegian whale bestiality—something Dr. Minsky II, Titular Professor at Cambridge and author of universally-acclaimed article "The general possibility of hitting bliss points: Underexplored implications of the MMT", had tweeted was "complete bullshit". 

Dr. Clifford Banes was the first winner, motivated by the tremendous advance in the study of insecurity symptoms on personality disorders. The general method consisted of having individuals who used collective urinals as the healthy controls. Rumour had it that another psychologist who used lobsters as a proxy for human behavior was a close second.

Sverre had went on a rampage, kicking everything in front of him. The chairs were the first victims, and soon would be the coffee machine; his thrashing was accompanied by ill-hidden cries of frustration and agony. Pietro stepped back, a rush of adrenaline telling he should be away from that place. He tried to silence that voice. 

"Sverre?" he called, uncertain. It appeared as though the other was unable to hear anything.

Sverre had accompanied the process of the new selected Nobel since its first announcement. He had been unusually excited, cheering for Statistics everytime it went up a percentage point in the poll, as if his life depended on it. To see it dismissed ignited his reaction: It was the first opportunity for his area's existence to be known by the general public; of course Statistics was the discipline actually considered, but maybe, just maybe, it was a shining light for Actuary to be known by anyone outside the field.

An epiphany who had no time to be well-rationalized sent Pietro running to campus' Psychology Department, which really wasn't that far, only separated from the FinSci by a medium plaza. He was barely able to notice the staff and alumni gathered, opening what, by their hollow sound, were bottles of champagne, as he hurried to the stationery store. Having only time to dry a drop of swear falling from his temple, he ordered copies of a few of Dr. Banes's articles, commonly used in the classes. Time seemed to be passing particularly slowly as the printer released the papers one by one.

He came back to find the RavenLab in utter disgrace: everything was out of order, half of the table was gone and wood of some other unrecognizable furniture scattered through the floor; some books were missing from the prateleira, which could partly explain why there were papers everywhere. Sverre was closing his cigarettes' pack with trembling hands, his fingers damaged by punching the walls; upon hearing the door opening, he hurried to hide his reddened eyes. 

Sverre nearly retracted when Pietro petted his shoulder. The latter also helped the lighter, holding the fire still a few centimeters before Sverre's cigarette, neglected between his lips. "I'm sorry," he sobbed as he leaned to catch the fire. "I don't know why I reacted like that. I promise I'll clean everything." 

He looked miserable. Pietro wondered if the Committee's announcement was really the source of the pandemonium, but the thought was short-lived.

"Don't worry about it for now. Today," Pietro declared, grinning way more than necessary to comfort a crying neighbor. "smoking is gonna save lives."

He thought it was the first time Sverre smiled to him. It was a confused and fragile one, granted, but enough to make Pietro smile back.

* * *

"It's faster if you roll," Sverre advised Pietro as they ended burning the rest of the articles.

Sverre was laughing in relief. The catharsis was effective, so say the least. The molotovs, for example, had been completely useless, as the two happily drank their content; possibly not only for the Nobel topic, but for the amount of issues who made their shoulders tense since the beginning of the year.


End file.
